Recognizing Our Children’s Emotions

Recognizing Our Children’s Emotions

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
— Proverbs 4:23

Parents should help their children recognize, understand, and properly express their emotions, teaching them to bring those emotions before God. In this way, they can develop emotional balance, spiritual maturity, and healthy behaviors.

Recognizing emotions helps us understand our children’s hearts

Ignoring emotions does not eliminate them; it only hides them. Helping children identify them allows them to better understand their inner world and develop greater balance.

Emotions reveal what is happening within us

Sadness, joy, fear, anger, and frustration communicate that something is happening in our inner world. Recognizing these emotions makes it possible to identify the needs, thoughts, and experiences associated with them.

Parents should teach their children to ask not only, “What do I feel?”, but also, “Why do I feel this way?”.

Ignoring emotions does not make them disappear

When a child learns to hide what they feel because of fear, shame, or misunderstanding, the emotion continues to influence them inwardly. Recognizing negative emotions makes it possible to express them appropriately, understand them, and decide how to respond, preventing unprocessed feelings from later governing attitudes, relationships, and decisions.

Principle: What a child learns to recognize in their heart can begin to be understood; and what they understand, they can learn to handle wisely.

Emotions must be brought from the heart into God’s presence

As parents, we must teach our children to present their emotions before God, thus forming a faith that integrates mind, heart, and behavior.

God does not ask us to deny what we feel, but to bring it to him

Healthy spirituality does not consist of hiding sadness, fear, or frustration behind religious expressions. Parents can teach that emotions can become prayer: honestly recognizing what we feel, bringing it before God, and allowing his truth to guide our response.

Spiritual maturity is learning to respond correctly to what we feel

Feeling anger does not require us to attack; feeling fear does not demand that we run away; experiencing sadness does not mean losing hope.

Children need to learn that emotions provide information, but their decisions must be guided by wisdom, biblical principles, and self-control.

Principle: Maturity does not consist of ceasing to feel, but of learning to understand what we feel and respond wisely before God.

Practical application

1. Teach children to name their emotions. Let us help our children identify whether they feel joy, sadness, fear, anger, or frustration. Naming an emotion correctly makes it easier to understand what is happening within and to progressively learn how to handle it.

2. Listen to the emotion before correcting the behavior. When there is an inappropriate reaction, let us first seek to discover what the child is feeling. Understanding their emotion does not justify their behavior; it provides the information needed to guide and correct with greater wisdom.

3. Teach them to talk with God about what they feel. Let us incorporate emotions into family prayer. Let us teach our children that they can sincerely tell God how they feel, ask for wisdom, and allow his Word to guide their responses afterward.

Conclusions

1. Emotions are part of the inner world that needs to be cared for. Proverbs 4:23 reminds us of the importance of the heart, because fundamental dimensions of our lives flow from it.

2. Recognizing an emotion does not mean allowing it to govern our behavior. Emotional formation helps a child identify what they feel, understand it, and then choose an appropriate response.

3. Spiritual formation must also include the emotional world. Parents have the opportunity to teach their children to bring before God what is happening in their hearts.

4. “We cannot teach our children to wisely govern their hearts if we first do not teach them to recognize what is happening within them.”